I am a thing capable of extracting information from the matter in motion around me, and using some of that information to increase the stability of my physical structure in a universe that is constantly changing; I am, in one word, alive.

But my physical structure isn't perfectly stable. As time progresses, every thing in the universe moves in relation to most other things, and the bits and pieces in my body that provide that capability are no exception; they are slowly but steadily moving away from the locations where they convey such capability, despite all my efforts to prevent so. My genes accumulate changes most of which are detrimental to their functions; the proteins I build with them are less and less effective as I grow older, and the programs that my cells execute (as sequential cascades of gene expression) are more likely to miss steps as my unstable genes become less and less recognisable by the molecules that need to bind to them, with who knows what random effects. There will come a time when I will lose the ability to extract information from reality and use it in the benefit of my own stability, and once I do, I will disintegrate at a rate that will depend greatly on the conditions of the environment around my lifeless body. But I won't have any notion of it, because I will have lost the ability to extract information from reality. Meanwhile, my intention is to enjoy life as much as I can.

Some people in my surroundings think that I should thank an abstraction in their minds for my ability to live, and they go as far as claiming that I will encounter that abstraction once my oxygen-depleted nerve cells are unable to regenerate the electrochemical potential across their membranes that they need in order to propagate a change in that potential (that is, a nervous impulse) from my sensory organs to my brain and from my brain to the effector cells in my muscles and glands. But that simply makes no sense and the people who make such claims often know little about biology other than where to put their thing in order to make more children, so I don't generally take "their" suggestions seriously. They, however, take them very seriously because they fear the abstraction's twisted sense of love. I enclosed the word "their" in quotation marks because it is seldom their suggestions; they most often get "their" ideas from books that date from the time when human beings hardly knew anything about anything, or from the interpretation of those books that some ingenious bastard provides today for his or her personal profit.

I was born on this planet about 40 years ago, and I am therefore administratively assigned to one of those artificial and abstract things they call countries, but that is only circumstantial and no one wouldn't gain any knowledge about me by reading the label attached to the country, so I will not even mention it because I find it irrelevant. My genes, however, are meiotically compatible only with the human subset of living beings, so I will say that I am of the human species, which I find more relevant than countries of origin and/or residence. I do not care whether people are English, Chinese, Egyptian, Congolese, Unitedstatesians or Antarctic (although that would definitely be cool). I care about whether people see humanity as a tool for their own enrichment, or whether they see themselves as a tool for the enrichment of humanity.

Because I think of humanity as a potential superorganism capable of unimaginable feats if we only helped each other to achieve them. Just like my whole body is a structure capable of much greater feats than any one of my cells considered separately. My cells do not compete against each other to show which one is the best cell; if they did, I would have probably died before I was a blastula. And if we only learned the value of mutual cooperation, for the benefit of the whole humanity (and many non-human beings that can provide their help too), we would all gain a lot from the effort, just like our cells (including non-human cells such as bacteria in our intestines) gain a lot from our existence.

However, I am stuck in a planet where a large proportion of the "clever" species compete for their personal "greatness", or for the "greatness" of their artificial countries and/or gods, and where some will go as far as diverting collective resources for the benefit of their own reproductive lines, just like the cells in a growing tumour do. Poor humanity, it is rotten with cancer even before it has become aware of its own existence.

But hey, it's God's plan, and he/she/it knows what he/she/it's doing because he/she/it is such an intelligent designer, that he/she/it has made life greatly dependant on the nuclear fusion happening inside the Sun, but he/she/it has only put there a limited amount of hydrogen able to fuse into heavier isotopes and chemical elements; what a clever plan. Aren't we all lucky?

Will there be things that call themselves "humans" once this planet is unable to sustain life? I don't know, I see it feasible but it depends entirely on the intelligence displayed by humanity as a collective. If we manage to kill ourselves for the "glory" of our own invented abstractions, or if we do not learn enough about life to be able to export it outside the Solar System, because we prefer to read ancient books instead, then I guess there will not be things that call themselves "humans" once this planet is unable to sustain life. Maybe even long before this planet becomes unhabitable. But there may be other things, and those things' archaeologists -or whatever they choose to call them- may be able to learn from our mistakes, so even if we manage to cause our own extinction, we may not turn out to be entirely useless.

In summary, I am a living thing that does not believe in the existence of abstractions outside our minds, that does not believe in geographic segregation and mutual competition as the road to our peaceful coexistence, and who thinks that exporting life to other stellar systems before this one becomes inhospitable is more useful than buying the most elaborate grave in the cemetery.

My greetings to everyone.

The following 3 users Like living thing's post:3 users Like living thing's postDLJ (31-03-2014), bemore (01-04-2014), kim (16-04-2014)

I am looking for a place where I can have a reasonable discussion about belief. I am not a theist, by any stretch of the imagination, but, I would be ashamed to call myself an atheist in today's environment. The reason for this is the thunderbolting, shrill, atheist fundamentalists that seem to dominate the discussion. They seem to be as bad as the theists, basically, "don't worship god or I will kill you." I recall one conversation in which the atheist moderator deliberately insulted his theist victim, then continue to insult her after she had hung up. You are not winning any hearts and minds with that approach. Bombing the hell out of them will not break their spirit. Also, logic will not work. There was a very interesting article in this weeks New Yorker on the breakdown in communications between the FBI and the Branch Davidians. The two sides just did not understand each other. If you are going to change minds, you have to have a way in.
Enough grandstanding. About me,male, married, old enough to know better

I'm a recovering charismatic christian fundamentalist... have been for 20 years, but never felt the need to identify as "atheist" before; non-theist and religious naturalist have been my preferred labels. But, ever on a journey...

However, so much joy and deep recognition in reading and listening to the atheist community lately. I am touched by the abundance of courage present here, and love being surrounded by the energy I had in my twenties when I was so hurt and appalled by what I had grown up with. And still am, frankly.

I have done some initial searches on the board with some success. I am not interested in heated tit-for-tat discussions and condescending throw-downs, and have no energy to engage in that way any more (that is part of my old fundie thinking, imho) but in meaningful sharing of people's journeys to affirm and discover the truth of their lives.

Seth talks a lot about people struggling to find community and his hope that this board can provide that. That would be so great, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope... yet...

Subjects I am super interested in discussing are:

a) Are there ways that aspects of religion -- albeit human-made and replete with horror -- is being used and appreciated by atheists? For instance, practices such as meditation or a daily examen (modified, OF COURSE) that enrich the practice of deep connection to life and others and reality. Some would call that spirituality, and I would, too, but that appears to be a pretty distasteful word on this forum! I'm curious if others who come from a religious past still feel a need to nurture themselves in ways that go beyond adhering to a new mental measuring stick for reality (ie, rational, scientific, etc.) to affirming multiple human inclinations for relationship, community, creativity, beauty, meaning, etc. and if there are people discussing the evolution of atheism, moving beyond reactivity.

b) Similarly, are atheists here discussing among themselves new personal psychologies that are rooted in a scientific worldview? For instance, in the context of evolution, the paradoxical viewpoints that 1) a single human is a tiny speck, a breath, a moment and we should grab life with all of the energy and love we can and appreciate each day as a gift, vs. 2) the idea that each person/creature/object is the center of the universe and how to live from that space that is kind of a sacred space -- each person inhabiting their moment and feeling their true place in the movement of the species through time, ie., we are living at the cutting edge of evolution and we can contribute through personal choice (The View from the Center of the Universe by Joel Primak and Nancy Abrams).

c) Lot's of discussion about what we used to believe and why it is false. However, other than the general challenges of moving away from that, are there discussions going on about the more psychological aspects of having participated in such binary and psychologically warped thinking? By this I mean, just because I left my former faith and its ideas of what is true, doesn't mean that I have healed the emotional and psychological scars, patterns, and mental addictions that were set up for me by it. For instance, binary thinking (black-and-white), the need to be right, condescension, self-absorption, apocalyptic thinking, anxiety, mind-body dualisms, trauma from spiritual and emotional abuse, and the ways that former religious thinking was wedded to personal and family dysfunctions, etc. The closest thing I have found to this so far is a book called Leaving the Fold by Marlene Winnell.